Thing is, there are two, I kind of want to call them ‘attractors’ working here.

Population keeps increasing, oil (and gas etc) supply dwindles as demand increases, there isn’t enough land to use solar/biomass to keep present standard of living.

The other one is that the oil (and gas etc) lasts long enough to totally fuck things up through climate change instead.

We seem to be headed into one or other of those attractors, and it does seem completely inevitable as long as market forces and economic growth continue to take total precendence over any other human considerations whatsoever.

Most of the post-oil solutions that we hear about aren’t too plausible either when you look at them in detail. For example if you work out exactly how much arable land you need for biofuels and compare it to what’s available, and to what’s required for the people we already have to eat food.

There is a sort of steady drip drip in the media of partial solutions that does tend to make it sound like answers are near at hand. This is accompanied by a steady drip drip of PR effort designed to convince us that there isn’t actually a problem. So people don’t know what to think unless they go do the research for themselves.

It’s subject to assumptions. For example, Pimentel (in ‘Food, Energy and Society’) offers the following assumptions for ‘business as usual’

On those assumptions, and assuming soil erosion etc is effectively dealt with using known methods, we get 2 billion sustainable global population with ‘EU-average energy use’. Unfortunately we already have 6 billion and rising, so there are obviously some tricky issues to be figured out here.

What does this mean for the UK?

Given that the policy of the leaders of the US and hence the UK appears to be to continue business as usual, at gunpoint where necessary, albeit with some cosmetic programmes here in the UK, I’d really like to understand what that is likely to mean for all of us.

An increasing weight of evidence has been emerging over the last few years, since the Shell announcements, that the production peak for conventional oil is pretty much imminent. Given rising demand and the failure to implement programmes which could control demand, presumably this means a rising trend in oil prices, and energy prices generally. As far as I’m aware this always causes a recession, and if prolonged, is likely to result in an economic depression of unprecedented dimensions.

The UK is particularly vulnerable, because due to ‘free-market’ policies we’ve been following since Thatcher, we’ve trashed our coal mining infrastructure, burned through most of our oil; we’ve also, since WW2, trashed a whole lot of our arable land and our population has grown to about 6x what it was before the industrial revolution.

It appears to me that any transition to renewable energy is urgent, and best accomplished right now, while we’re still relatively well-off in terms of these resources. While we have it, we should be using it to make the transition. If we wait until we’re in a depression, then the transition becomes much harder.

This is pretty clearly not the likely outcome though. So what are we in for?

I’d be very interested in having a more substantial discussion of the likely implications of this situation for people living in the UK, over the next few decades. Assuming that we carry on with business as usual.

We can do Pimentel’s calculation above for the UK. Here are some very rough numbers.

CIA world factbook says there are (I’ve converted from square miles to ha)

24.4million ha of land in the UK and 6.4 million hectares of it is arable land.

Pimentel says that on the assumptions given in his book, you need per cap:

If we just look at growing food and assuming (as an approximation) you can only do this on arable land, that means that in the absence of oil (as a limiting case) we have a sustainable population of about 12 million, so 1/5 of the numbers we presently have. This is pretty close to the 10m of the census of 1800, before the industrial revolution got started.

We can also be fairly sure that the remaining non-arable land isn’t all usable or available for pasture, biodiversity or energy systems such as bio-fuels. So we can conclude from this that with our present population, whatever the real sustainable figure is, it probably isn’t the 60million we have right now.

We aren’t going to be totally without oil in the forseeable future though, so this is definitely a limiting case, rather than an immediate problem. It does however give you a pretty good feel for how bad things could potentially get.

The gap between these numbers and present day reality is largely plugged by oil and gas, in a variety of different ways. Fuels, fertilisers, pesticides, etc. Those are all going to become much more expensive and much less available, producing economic hardship on a very large scale over the coming decades. Once we’re in a major economic depression, as a result of global oil shortages, something I think is likely within a decade or so, then we’re in a much worse position to make any investments in sustainable alternatives.

With our current political system, only pro-capitalist parties can get elected, so if we’re assuming ‘business as usual’ then we’re assuming this is happening in a capitalist context, with major unemployment due to economic depression.

Assumptions are obviously being made to arrive at Prof. Pimentel’s figures. You can find them articulated in great detail in his book ‘Food, Energy and Society.’ What he’s assuming, roughly, is business as usual, only with sustainable energy and agriculture. So he’s not for example assuming big changes in population distribution. This is quite important. In practice, a fairly large amount of the energy used by the average family is spent in putting food on the table, far more than on running cars or heating their homes for example.

The relatively massive energy use in food production arises because of the process that puts food on the table. Pimentel offers a figure of 10 units of oil energy to put 1 unit of food energy on an average US table. This breaks down as petrochemicals used as fertiliser, drugs for animals and pesticide, transport of fertiliser, drugs for animals and pesticide, harvesting, transport of cereals, vegetables and fruit, transport of animals, transport and disposal of wastes, food processing, packaging, transport to supermarkets etc. See for example what’s in your bag of supermarket salad? for a discussion of just some of these process stages in a bit more detail.

If I eat a tomato grown organically 3m from where I’m sitting right now, then clearly these costs don’t apply. I don’t want to spend my whole life growing food however. So in order to minimise these kinds of costs, but maximise the efficiency of food production and hence radically reduce the energy needs of our way of life, I would suggest that one should cooperate with others to grow food close to where one lives. Eco-villages with a population in the 2-500 range are optimal and experience with these models seems to imply an average of say 8 hrs per cap per week spent growing food.

You can do a fair bit better than Pimentel’s assumed 1.5 ha for food, pasture, biodiversity etc, and also reduce his 1.5 ha for energy. You need about 0.25 ha per cap for this system to produce a complete and balanced diet, but you still need some space for energy systems, to heat your home etc. But around 0.5 ha or somewhere around one acre per human, is enough to provide for a decent way of life.

Assuming that acre is decent arable land, that still only implies a sustainable UK population of around 12m though, while we have 60m citizens at present. If you assume only half of it needs to be arable, you get 24m, but in practice, you mostly don’t get land that’s half arable and half marginal and that matters if were talking about something as localised as an eco-village.

I think that you still need to find some way to recover land that presently isn’t viable, in order to sustain our present population in the absence of oil, but assuming big changes in our way of life.

I think it’s in the realms of the possible, but not with ‘business as usual’ assumptions, or population distribution.

Let’s break down where the oil inputs to agriculture go and analyse them a bit. I suggest we separate two cases.

1) The difference between agricultural efficiency using pesticides etc and by standard organic methods. Typically organic gives about 20% less yield (see e.g. this 21 year study ), but is much more efficient in its use of say nitrogen inputs. Nor does it damage the soil, which petrochemical agriculture does. Given that erosion is also a major food security issue, this is pretty important.

2) All the other stuff. This includes fuels for farm equipment, which is mostly replaceable by work animals given sufficient land for pasture. It’s mostly a matter of fuel for food distribution and packaging and waste disposal though.

The solutions to the latter case would appear to me to be localisation of food production so that you don’t need to use lots of oil for fuel, packaging etc.

So we need to look at the localisation model to see how much extra labour would be required. If a vast amount of extra labour is required, that’s presumably where it comes from, as we can get fairly comparable yields from conventional organic vs chemical farms without the need to greatly increase the labour inputs.

The furthest extreme is everybody just grows their own. Even on that basis, organic smallholders who seek self-sufficiency (rather than those farming commercially) generally seem to manage to produce their food with a fairly reasonable *average* day, although this means pretty heavy labour at some times of year, with relatively light labour the rest of the time. You can get a pretty good feel for what’s involved from Borsodi

It makes more sense to share the labour over a locality though. With an eco-village of 400 people, the figure I’ve seen quoted is 20% of working time spent on growing food, which I believe is based on Swedish eco-village results (I’ll check this)

Now to be sure, the resultant way of life is not at all that promoted by the corporate ‘lifestyle’ industry, but it’s about as comfortable as that of village life circa 1910, plus a few low energy impact forms of modern technology. It’s interestingly, rather similar in some important ways to what Kropotkin describes in ‘Fields, Factories and Workshops’ although he’s coming at it from a rather different direction and isn’t aware of some of the resource issues.

I would argue that if we keep using unsustainable methods to provide food and energy, no matter how cleverly we do it, we just defer the problems. I think that unsustainable energy sources will probably be needed to enable a sane transition to sustainability, given any believeable projections of global population, food and energy supply vs demand etc over the next century.

I don’t think we have any acceptable choice besides making such a transition, but I think that the political influence of capitalists, religious fanatics and other nuisances will make that transition more difficult than it needs to be and may even succeed in making it disastrous for billions of us.

What needs to be done is pretty clear to me though, global population has to be reduced over time (ideally by family planning rather than by the Four Horsemen), unsustainable energy use needs to be phased out, while we still have sufficient of it to boot-strap the transition to sustainable energy use.

Our way of life has to change to make this happen. It won’t be business as usual, but it needn’t be some hellish dystopia either. It depends how we do it. The problem I forsee is that we’ll wait too long to take the necessity seriously and end up trying to make the transition to a lower energy society after the demand for energy has overtaken the supply permanently, with predictably dire economic results. At that point everything gets much harder.

åIf we mess it up badly enough, instead of reducing energy demand through appropriate technology, improving food security through sustainable forms of agriculture and reducing demand for both food and energy by managing global population down over the course of a few generations; we all just pretend that there isn’t any problem until those Four Horsemen arrive to solve these problems for us the hard way. This appears to be the solution favoured by certain factions within those countries most able to do something about it.

Some people want to rely on the panacea capabilities of ‘markets.’ Is this a reasonable hope?

Global markets will clearly do something in response to climate change, significant changes in the availability of oil resources, soil erosion and so on. I think you’d have to be working from some kind of quasi-religious certainty to be sure that the response of the markets will necessarily be both entirely beneficial and sufficient to this problem, as some seem to do.

The question from my point of view is not whether the sacred power of markets will make everything turn out for the best automatically. I think that unlikely for a variety of reasons, in much the same way as I think Resurrection and Virgin Birth unlikely. Free market theology aside though, I think that markets will clearly play a significant role in responding to oil and gas depletion, but I think it’s unlikely to be a uniformly positive one. Similarly, as is probably clear from my review of the Stern Report below, I don’t think much of their response to the early signals of climate change.

Political-military rather than strictly economic responses may also occur. Some might argue that they are already occurring, say in Iraq.

The petroleum energy requirements of industrial agriculture suggest that where industrial agriculture is practiced, the demand for petroleum energy is both high and inelastic, with worrying implications for food security as global reserves become sigificantly depleted.

Right now we are in a steady state where we and billions like us mostly live on food grown using high oil-input agriculture. That looks to me very like a system that might fail catastrophically given the appropriate conditions. Those conditions might not be met, but I think the science says that such conditions could exist.

It seems likely, given that it takes ten units of oil energy to put one unit of food energy on our tables, that we’d see catastrophic global food security problems if the supply were to fail suddenly and drastically. So as a limiting case, industrial agriculture would fail catastrophically, if oil supplies were cut off totally and suddenly.

In the real world, energy supplies will probably not be cut off so suddenly and totally, but then the question arises, just how drastic would the onset of oil scarcity have to be, before a catastrophic failure of industrial agriculture is likely to occur?

That wars are apparently already being fought over these resources, suggests to me that extreme conditions might occur.

I think that when people suggest that this is a matter that can be handled by the working of markets, they’re in effect assuming a steady-state case, and that may be right. It doesn’t mean that catastrophic cases can’t arise. Nor does it mean that the ‘civilised’ rules of the markets game can’t get suspended in favour of the use of force to simply appropriate these indispensable resources.

Markets may do something useful about global food security, but they may also do things that are counterproductive.

My problem isn’t with the idea that markets might have a useful contribution to make, they may; it’s with anyone that appears to suggest, that markets are in and of themselves, reliably and certainly the answer to the problem of depletion, where the resource being depleted plays such a fundamental role in the functioning of our societies.

It takes ten units of oil energy to put one unit of food energy on our tables. This isn’t just about people driving slightly smaller cars.

I have a big problem with any doctrine that makes light of the fundamental questions raised by oil/gas depletion or suggests that it’ll be solved by some form of continuing business as usual.

I think some more fundamental approaches may be required, and some of those would significantly benefit from public policy support. For example, fundamental structural adjustments are needed, I suspect, for agriculture to do its job in a world of depleted oil. These adjustments would tend to involve radical decentralisation of our food systems, bringing grower and consumer physically closer to reduce fuel costs. They also involve moving away from input-based agriculture towards one that recycles nutrients, especially Phosphorous.

These changes are at present ones that the agri-chem commercial interests and their representatives in government are likely to passionately oppose. Can you imagine for example, Lord Sainsbury giving his wholehearted support to a food security policy that takes us away from massively centralised supermarket chains (like the ones that made him a billionaire?) Or can you imagine what the very influential oil and chemical giants would make of an approach to nutrient managment that was largely decentralised and not profitable, leaving them out of the loop, despite being more sustainable?

One plausible approach I’ve seen suggested, from a sustainability point of view is Folke Gunther’s ‘Re-ruralisation’. A progressive rearrangement of our population distribution over decades into sustainable eco-villages. Interview about this approach with Dr Gunther here

For the sake of discussion only, let’s imagine that the case for the ruralisation approach advocated in the article I linked is the optimal way, from a greatest good for the greatest number of people point of view, for achieving sustainability.

Given the starting conditions, how do we get to a point in the UK where that strategy is being applied effectively?

I don’t think the magic power of The Market is going to do it, in fact I’d be surprised if market advocates didn’t try to argue that it can’t be a correct strategy because The Market won’t do it.

I can’t see any of the people who profit from centralisation giving support to decentralisation, in fact I’d expect them to be hostile.

Both the farmer and the consumer are getting a better deal at the expense of a bunch of people in the middle, who are mostly involved in the distribution, industrial processing aspects of our current food system, and those oil companies who sell them energy. Also being disadvantaged by ruralisation are property developers, estate agents and others.

Imagine for a moment that it’s the second half of the 21st century. Oil is several $k a barrel in today’s prices and there isn’t nearly enough to go around. The global climate is several degrees hotter than it ought to be. Industrial agriculture very probably broke down catastrophically for a while there due to oil shortages and regular agriculture has been hard hit by freak weather and soil erosion, but people have made their adjustments. Humans are pretty adaptable creatures after all, but it wasn’t a bit pleasant at the time or even remotely painless. Hundreds of millions may die or become refugees.

We know now, with the benefit of hindsight, that the boards, syndicates and governments of the Earth potentially knew all about oil depletion from the 1960’s onwards, and climate change from the 1980’s onward. They were told, and yet they did nothing useful about it but instead looked for ways to turn it to their advantage. In the early part of the 21st Century the most powerful country on Earth, staring this problem in the face, invaded the second largest oil producer and then held the price of oil down at gunpoint, still overconsuming blindly until the crash.

When our descendants are grown, and of an age to have influence in their world, this is the world that they’ll most likely have to face.

We’ll have tried our best to give them what might help, I hope, but we probably can’t easily imagine what their life will be like.

What will they think of us for letting this happen? Was capitalism too powerful? Was the media too persuasive? Was our oil-funded miserable ease too ennervating to permit us to do something?

What should we tell them, assuming this situation comes to pass?

No doubt: there won’t be a state pension system to save us if they kick us out on our incontinent arses for letting this awful shit happen.

So we’d better start thinking about what we’re going to say to them, assuming we didn’t actually find any way to prevent this.

I was just re-reading Seymour Hersh’s article from last April, on US planning for starting a war with Iran. It’s very interesting, even though events haven’t quite developed as per the plans he described (e.g. last year’s Israeli attempt to ‘take out’ Hezbollah prior to starting a war with Iran, to remove them as a factor in Iranian retaliation didn’t exactly come off as intended, despite the horrible spectacle of our slimy Prime Minister Mr Blair trying to prevent a cease-fire while the IDF bombed Lebanese civilians.)

An awful lot of it is very consistent with the stuff we’ve been seeing lately though and I found that re-reading it strongly confirmed my concerns that we’re seeing the build up to some sort of ‘double or nothing’ attempt to start a war with Iran while they still have the opportunity.

With regard to the possibility of a nuclear attack, I think it depends what they’re trying to do. If they’re actually trying to eliminate Iran’s nuclear capability, then it probably looks very tempting to use nukes. Especially if due to Bush’s current huge credibility problem, the Israelis are going to have to start the party before the US can find itself ‘forced’ to join in.

On the other hand, the motivation of the neo-cons may be less to do with Iran’s nuclear weapons programme (which even the CIA can’t find any evidence of and thinks they’re years away from having even if they’re somehow doing it invisibly) and more to do with competition for regional dominance. In which case the arguments for using nuclear weapons on Iran are far less persuasive because all you’re really trying to do is create a provocation that would allow the US to destroy Iran’s infrastructure with a massive bombing campaign and do a variety of other things intended to weaken the regime and to significantly reduce its capability as a regional competitor.

In that scenario all the talk of Iranian nuclear weapons and an immediate pressing need to destroy them functions rather more like all the talk of Saddam’s WMD did when the same people were trying (and sadly succeeding) to produce some big fat stinking lies scary enough to get enough of the public onside with the idea to go ahead with their proposed military adventures. I don’t think it’s by any means impossible that this is happening again, and if it is, all the talk of an imminent threat causing Israel to use nukes is probably just some more propaganda bullshit.

Here’s an article that makes a reasonably convincing argument that the possibility of Iran developing nuclear weapons is merely a propaganda issue.

Just as the true reasons for the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq were not “weapons of mass destruction” or “links to Al Qaeda,” so too, the real reason for the present U.S.-Iran crisis is not about the ostensible “nuclear threat” posed by Iran. The Iranians are nowhere near to developing highly-enriched uranium for nuclear weapons. In fact, they appear to be far from even producing sufficient low-level enriched uranium to use in fuel rods for their Russian-built nuclear power plant. But, even if they were near to building a nuclear bomb, Iranian nukes would not, per se, be why Washington wants to remove the mullahs from power. Just this February Bush was very pleased to recognize India as a nuclear power—a country that has actually done what Washington is accusing Teheran of trying to do. He did this after India sided with the U.S. against Iran on the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) critical report to the UN. So too, Bush hasn’t insisted that Pakistan, a country which admits to having proliferated nuclear weapons, and which has powerful Islamic fundamentalist movements, give up its illegally developed nuclear weapons—rather, he has called Pakistan a “close ally” of the U.S.

No, the true reason for the U.S. push against Iran’s nuclear program and for “regime change” is about maintaining U.S. hegemony in the oil-rich Persian Gulf region. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), about 60 percent of the world’s conventional oil reserves are located in essentially five countries in the Persian Gulf region. Whoever has predominant influence there has their hand on “the global oil spigot”—a prize that brings enormous power and leverage. Washington has worked since the 1979 Iranian Revolution to keep the Iran of the mullahs from once again becoming the oil-producing powerhouse it was under the Shah. Indeed, gradually, especially in the years just after the Iran-Iraq War, Washington came to an absolutely firm, bi-partisan consensus that, no matter what promises the mullahs might make, the mullahs simply cannot be trusted. Even when the mullahs have offered quite stunning compromises, Washington has rejected them. Its reasoning is that, if Iran’s production were allowed to rapidly climb (and indeed, it has the potential for significant growth), the mullah’s would become rich and powerful players and would use their position to undermine the U.S.-backed Saudi royals and the Kuwaiti emir—and thereby U.S regional hegemony.

You never quite know with fanatics like Bush, Blair and the paranoid loons running Israel though, so it’s at least worth examining the possibility that they really are that irresponsible.

Here’s some of the reasoning from Hersh’s sources on the need to use nuclear weapons to be sure of destroying hardened facilities. The discussion here is about US military options, but due to its rather weaker strike capability, it applies even more strongly to Israel (nominally) ‘going it alone’

One of the military’s initial option plans, as presented to the White House by the Pentagon this winter, calls for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites. One target is Iran’s main centrifuge plant, at Natanz, nearly two hundred miles south of Tehran. Natanz, which is no longer under I.A.E.A. safeguards, reportedly has underground floor space to hold fifty thousand centrifuges, and laboratories and workspaces buried approximately seventy-five feet beneath the surface. That number of centrifuges could provide enough enriched uranium for about twenty nuclear warheads a year. (Iran has acknowledged that it initially kept the existence of its enrichment program hidden from I.A.E.A. inspectors, but claims that none of its current activity is barred by the Non-Proliferation Treaty.) The elimination of Natanz would be a major setback for Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but the conventional weapons in the American arsenal could not insure the destruction of facilities under seventy-five feet of earth and rock, especially if they are reinforced with concrete.

There is a Cold War precedent for targeting deep underground bunkers with nuclear weapons. In the early nineteen-eighties, the American intelligence community watched as the Soviet government began digging a huge underground complex outside Moscow. Analysts concluded that the underground facility was designed for “continuity of government”—for the political and military leadership to survive a nuclear war. (There are similar facilities, in Virginia and Pennsylvania, for the American leadership.) The Soviet facility still exists, and much of what the U.S. knows about it remains classified. “The ‘tell’ ”—the giveaway—“was the ventilator shafts, some of which were disguised,” the former senior intelligence official told me. At the time, he said, it was determined that “only nukes” could destroy the bunker. He added that some American intelligence analysts believe that the Russians helped the Iranians design their underground facility. “We see a similarity of design,” specifically in the ventilator shafts, he said.

A former high-level Defense Department official told me that, in his view, even limited bombing would allow the U.S. to “go in there and do enough damage to slow down the nuclear infrastructure—it’s feasible.”

But those who are familiar with the Soviet bunker, according to the former senior intelligence official, “say ‘No way.’ You’ve got to know what’s underneath—to know which ventilator feeds people, or diesel generators, or which are false. And there’s a lot that we don’t know.” The lack of reliable intelligence leaves military planners, given the goal of totally destroying the sites, little choice but to consider the use of tactical nuclear weapons. “Every other option, in the view of the nuclear weaponeers, would leave a gap,” the former senior intelligence official said. “ ‘Decisive’ is the key word of the Air Force’s planning. It’s a tough decision. But we made it in Japan.”

He went on, “Nuclear planners go through extensive training and learn the technical details of damage and fallout—we’re talking about mushroom clouds, radiation, mass casualties, and contamination over years. This is not an underground nuclear test, where all you see is the earth raised a little bit. These politicians don’t have a clue, and whenever anybody tries to get it out”—remove the nuclear option—“they’re shouted down.”

Here’s what I think might be about to happen. Bush is trying to mobilise additional troops, he’s already sent an additional carrier battle group and according to some sources, what sounds like one or more of their amphibious assault groups each carrying about a brigade of marines with their own armour, helicopters and so on.

Suppose the basic concept described in that Hersh article has changed slightly due to unplanned circumstances, but not all that much. Hersh talks about the US launching an all-out attack on both Iran’s nuclear facilities and at the same time, their various other capabilities, naval and Pasdaran bases and so on, in order to suppress their ability to retaliate. Suppose instead, that Israel will apparently unilaterally, attack the key Iranian nuclear facilities on its own. Israel certainly appears to have the capability to use nuclear weapons, so if we assume the intention really is to destroy Iran’s nuclear programme, then that’d be the only viable approach for them, for reasons explained in the long quote above. If as seems a bit more likely though, they’re just trying to start a war with Iran that’ll give Bush his excuse, then the nukes aren’t necessary.

The Iranians are likely to retaliate to any serious attack though whatever US/Israeli intetions are, and given that they’ve been preparing for war with ‘The Great Satan’ for almost three decades now, they’ve certainly got quite a range of options for doing so. Here’s what Professor Paul Rogers and his team from the Oxford Research Group have to say about this bright idea.

An air attack on Iran by Israeli or US forces would be aimed at setting back Iran’s nuclear programme by at least five years. A ground offensive by the United States to terminate the regime is not feasible given other commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, and would not be attempted. An air attack would involve the systematic destruction of research, development, support and training centres for nuclear and missile programmes and the killing of as many technically competent people as possible. A US attack, which would be larger than anything Israel could mount, would also involve comprehensive destruction of Iranian air defence capabilities and attacks designed to pre-empt Iranian retaliation. This would require destruction of Iranian Revolutionary Guard facilities close to Iraq and of regular or irregular naval forces that could disrupt Gulf oil transit routes.

Although US or Israeli attacks would severely damage Iranian nuclear and missile programmes, Iran would have many methods of responding in the months and years that followed. These would include disruption of Gulf oil production and exports, in spite of US attempts at pre-emption, systematic support for insurgents in Iraq, and encouragement to associates in Southern Lebanon to stage attacks on Israel. There would be considerable national unity in Iran in the face of military action by the United States or Israel, including a revitalised Revolutionary Guard.

One key response from Iran would be a determination to reconstruct a nuclear programme and develop it rapidly into a nuclear weapons capability, with this accompanied by withdrawal from the Non-Proliferation Treaty. This would require further attacks. A military operation against Iran would not, therefore, be a short-term matter but would set in motion a complex and long-lasting confrontation. It follows that military action should be firmly ruled out and alternative strategies developed.

However, the US has already reinforced its carrier presence and possibly also has positioned amphibious assault forces ready to e.g. try to deal with the very numerous Iranian missile sites along the Straits of Hormuz and sent has additional Patriot missile batteries according to some sources. They’ve also got a troop surge planned, if not authorised, to provide additional manpower in the fairly likely event of Iraqi Shiites kicking off.

So in this scenario, Israel to nobody’s surprise, does something mental and Bush doesn’t have to take any official responsibility for it, but when the Iranians start retaliating, he can call that provocation and use it as his casus belli for joining in the nice new war the Israel will have just started for him.

The Democrats just took control of Congress, are likely to use that to bury the Bush administration in subpoenas to drag the skeletons out of their closets with a view to taking the Presidency in 2008. Although the party leaders don’t want it, the Democrat grass-roots are baying for impeachment and may perhaps succeed in getting a state legislature to send up a bill to Congress. Cheney is due to testify under oath shortly in the Libby / Plame case and there is a strong possibility that he’ll get strangled by his own lies. In general, then, control is slowly but surely slipping away from them.

Appearing on TV the other night, smeared in blood and wearing a necklace made from babies heads, President Bush tried to his best to get the US all excited about a resurgent bloodbath in Iraq and the public reaction, aside from his hard-core of drool-case supporters, seemed to largely consist of angry contempt. Blair tried the same thing yesterday and got pretty much the same reaction from the British public, only perhaps more so.

So the lunatics in the White House may view this as their last chance to push their agenda to the next stage. Once they’ve actually started a war with Iran, perhaps with a bit of help from Israel, then whatever the Democrats might think that they’re going to do with control of Congress, they’ll be committed.

As you’ve probably heard by now, control of Iraq’s oil is to be handed over to certain corporations, under what are known as Production-Sharing Agreements (PSAs). These agreements are long term (decades long) deals which give the oil corporations the lion’s share of the profits, and which bind the Iraqis to terms agreed by their current government. Terms which a reasonable person might conclude are not exactly favourable to the Iraqi people.

Here’s the main article in which the story was broken in the English-speaking world, by yesterday’s Indepedent on Sunday.

And Iraq’s oil reserves, the third largest in the world, with an estimated 115 billion barrels waiting to be extracted, are a prize worth having. As Vice-President Dick Cheney noted in 1999, when he was still running Halliburton, an oil services company, the Middle East is the key to preventing the world running out of oil.

Now, unnoticed by most amid the furore over civil war in Iraq and the hanging of Saddam Hussein, the new oil law has quietly been going through several drafts, and is now on the point of being presented to the cabinet and then the parliament in Baghdad. Its provisions are a radical departure from the norm for developing countries: under a system known as “production-sharing agreements”, or PSAs, oil majors such as BP and Shell in Britain, and Exxon and Chevron in the US, would be able to sign deals of up to 30 years to extract Iraq’s oil.

PSAs allow a country to retain legal ownership of its oil, but gives a share of profits to the international companies that invest in infrastructure and operation of the wells, pipelines and refineries. Their introduction would be a first for a major Middle Eastern oil producer. Saudi Arabia and Iran, the world’s number one and two oil exporters, both tightly control their industries through state-owned companies with no appreciable foreign collaboration, as do most members of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, Opec.

Critics fear that given Iraq’s weak bargaining position, it could get locked in now to deals on bad terms for decades to come. “Iraq would end up with the worst possible outcome,” said Greg Muttitt of Platform, a human rights and environmental group that monitors the oil industry. He said the new legislation was drafted with the assistance of BearingPoint, an American consultancy firm hired by the US government, which had a representative working in the American embassy in Baghdad for several months.

“Three outside groups have had far more opportunity to scrutinise this legislation than most Iraqis,” said Mr Muttitt. “The draft went to the US government and major oil companies in July, and to the International Monetary Fund in September. Last month I met a group of 20 Iraqi MPs in Jordan, and I asked them how many had seen the legislation. Only one had.”

We haven’t yet seen the final bill, which is due to be rammed through this week, but the draft, familiar to the oil majors and the IMF, but not apparently to most Iraqi MPs, contains things which give rise to understandable concern. From the Independent, who have seen a copy of this quasi-secret draft:

“A Foreign Person may repatriate its exports proceeds [in accordance with the foreign exchange regulations in force at the time].” Shares in oil projects can also be sold to other foreign companies: “It may freely transfer shares pertaining to any non-Iraqi partners.” The final draft outlines general terms for production sharing agreements, including a standard 12.5 per cent royalty tax for companies.

It is also understood that once companies have recouped their costs from developing the oil field, they are allowed to keep 20 per cent of the profits, with the rest going to the government. According to analysts and oil company executives, this is because Iraq is so dangerous, but Dr Muhammad-Ali Zainy, a senior economist at the Centre for Global Energy Studies, said: “Twenty per cent of the profits in a production sharing agreement, once all the costs have been recouped, is a large amount.” In more stable countries, 10 per cent would be the norm.

While the costs are being recovered, companies will be able to recoup 60 to 70 per cent of revenue; 40 per cent is more usual. David Horgan, managing director of Petrel Resources, an Aim-listed oil company focused on Iraq, said: “They are reasonable rates of return, and take account of the bad security situation in Iraq. The government needs people, technology and capital to develop its oil reserves. It has got to come up with terms which are good enough to attract companies. The major companies tend to be conservative.”

Dr Zainy, an Iraqi who has recently visited the country, said: “It’s very dangerous … although the security situation is far better in the north.” Even taking that into account, however, he believed that “for a company to take 20 per cent of the profits in a production sharing agreement once all the costs have been recouped is large”.

Immediate Value

So, it appears that the bloody shambles the incompetents in Washington have made of Iraq is turning out to be advantageous for at least some, those oil companies who will obtain PSAs at extremely favourable terms, justified by the risks implied by the horrific security situation in Iraq.

PSAs in which shares are, you will notice, tradable and hence can become the subject of very profitable speculation before a barrel of oil is pumped under their terms. Consider for a moment the value to a speculator of a share in the long-term rights to exploit some of the largest and potentially most profitable reserves of oil left on the planet. These deals are very long term, so the security situation may improve, in which case such shares would become far more valuable as a result, and and a canny speculator can bet profitably against that possibility.

The enormous and rapidly growing (as we use up active reserves) potential value of these PSAs could potentially underwrite, if I’m not mistaken, a hugely valuable speculative market.

In addition, it’s very likely that large additional supplies exist in the relatively unexplored regions, regions which seem to have been of great interest to Cheney’s Energy Task Force. So the potential exists for proving out those fields and radically increasing the reserves controlled by the relevant oil majors (along with their share prices and executive stock options) Those parts of Iraq are lightly inhabited, so at least as far as exploration goes, if not production, the security issue isn’t too much of a worry.

Future Value

Of course, at some point, let’s say in a decade or so, the necessity of actually pumping that oil will start to become overwhelming. It’s the last really big pool of relatively unexploited, easy to access, high quality oil on the planet. There are plenty of places with a very great deal of heavy oil, Venezuela being one obvious example, but that costs so much more to turn into something useful.

Ultimately though, someone is going to want to pump that oil. So the question is, now that they’ve got these deals locked in for a few decades, or rather assuming all this gets rammed through the Iraqi parliament on schedule, just how are they going to actually lift the oil?

Presumably security is a key concern. From the point of view of the oil companies, the motivation is to secure pipelines and infrastructure, but not necessarily to do anything particularly positive about the overall Iraqi security situation unless it happens as a side effect of their primary concerns.

A couple of things now seem very obvious. The US may withdraw troops from the cities, but it’s certainly going to want to maintain large bases from which to deploy its high-tech super weapons in defence of all that precious oil. I also doubt that any of this comes as a surprise to James Baker’s ISG or to Dick Cheney, so perhaps the US debate about Iraq can usefully be interpreted in terms of the specific commercial problem of exploiting Iraq’s oil. An issue that seems to have faded from the mainstream discussions about Iraq, but which is no doubt foremost in the minds of at least some US leaders.

There’s a lot of room for speculation here, and I’d be very interested in any comments on how the oil companies might think this could be best achieved.

A cynical person might for example, look at what happened to the PSAs negotiated after the fall of the Soviet Union with a weak Russian government and which have recently been overturned by Putin’s government, which has just re-negotiated much more more favourable deals now that it’s strong enough to do so.

A cynical person might conclude that from the oil companies point of view, a weak and divided Iraqi government, terrified that if the US doesn’t protect them from their own citizens, they and their families will be tortured to death by angry zealots from a multitude of rival militias, gangs and whatnot, might actually be advantageous to the oil companies, who would therefore have no particular reason to want the overall security situation in Iraq resolved as long as they’re able to lift and ship ‘their’ oil. After all, while their cut remains at 70% of all those hundreds of billions of dollars worth of oil, they can afford to spend a bit on pipeline security and so on. Whereas if the Iraqi government ever became strong enough and the country stable enough to tell them to fuck off as Putin has done recently, they’d be making considerably less money on the deal.

“He supports the inquiry by the Iraqi authorities. He does believe that the manner of execution was completely wrong, but this shouldn’t lead us to forget the crimes that Saddam committed, including the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.”

“As Tony sees it though, if you go around hanging people for killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, then you’d have to hang him and his mate GW, so he’s not really terribly keen on the idea.”

In the light of this, I see another possible explanation or two for the apparent confusion over the military objectives behind the planned ‘troop surge.’

Even if, as seems likely the ‘Israel to nuke Iran’ story is a deliberate ‘intelligence source’ leak via the Murdoch press intended as part of somebody or other’s media disinformation campaign, it’s still demonstrating just how deranged things are in that region, in no small part due to neo-conservative foreign policy adventures, which appear to still be ongoing and dedicated to the challenge of making things worse. The lack of any announcements of a coherent plan for the use of these troops makes me wonder if they’re actually being sent to deal with the expected backlash when the US and/or Israel attacks Iran. After all, the neo-cons handed Iran a massive strategic gain by making such a mess of Iraq that they had to let a bunch of pro-Iranian parties form a government. They can’t be at all happy about that, so I really wouldn’t assume they’ve finished causing disasters yet.

Another plausible provocation would be the attempt to privatise Iraq’s oil, another as-yet unrealised neo-con objective, that they’re apparently going to try to ram through in the next few weeks.

Perhaps this is why Bush intends to send extra troops but is being extremely vague about what they’re supposed to be doing? If he’s expecting massive unrest to kick off because of something he plans to do, e.g. this, or bombing Iran or something, then it would make sense to send more troops (plus the extra carrier battle group that just arrived) but he’d have a hard time explaining coherently exactly why he’s sending them, because it wouldn’t necessarily look to good to say ‘we’ll need the extra forces because we plan to annoy the Iraqis even more’

The neo-cons are going to be tied up pretty soon by subpoena-waving Democrats dragging all kinds of horrible mediapathic skeletons out of the White House’s closets in preparation for the 2008 elections, so if they want to privatise Iraq’s oil, start a war with Iran and so on in order to tick off the last few items on their ‘must do’ list of global foreign policy disasters, then this is probably their last chance at act. Once the US public has seen the traditional ‘Last helicopter taking off from the US Embassy roof’ scene played out in Baghdad’s Green Zone, which can’t be more than a couple of years away now, the chance of getting them onside with any new foreign policy adventures is likely to be over for another generation.

On those assumptions it’d make a lot of sense for them to try to get their last few acts of irresponsible craziness in fast and hence also to reinforce as far as possible before the shit really started to hit the fan. Once they’ve kicked it all off, it doesn’t really matter what the Democrats do, because they’ll be committed. As the Oxford Study Group point out, it’s a lot easier to start a war with Iran than to finish it.

Although US or Israeli attacks would severely damage Iranian nuclear and missile programmes, Iran would have many methods of responding in the months and years that followed. These would include disruption of Gulf oil production and exports, in spite of US attempts at pre-emption, systematic support for insurgents in Iraq, and encouragement to associates in Southern Lebanon to stage attacks on Israel. There would be considerable national unity in Iran in the face of military action by the United States or Israel, including a revitalised Revolutionary Guard.

Indeed for a variety of reasons, a war with Iran would possibly be saleable to the US public once they’d actually started it, despite them being totally fed up with the war in Iraq. For a start there is all that unpleasant holocaust denial stuff Ahmadinejad keeps coming out with. Then there’s the US Embassy hostages humiliation, which even liberal Americans seem to be quite angry about decades later and finally, something that’s almost an existential issue for the US. If the neo-cons did manage to start their war with Iran, most of the likely scenarios would put oil prices way up, which means intolerably high fuel costs.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 6 — President Bush’s new Iraq strategy calls for a rapid influx of forces that could add as many as 20,000 American combat troops to Baghdad, supplemented with a jobs program costing as much as $1 billion intended to employ Iraqis in projects including painting schools and cleaning streets, according to American officials who are piecing together the last parts of the initiative.

The American officials said that Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, formally agreed in a long teleconference on Thursday with Mr. Bush to match the American troop increase, made up of five combat brigades that would come in at a rate of roughly one a month, by sending three additional Iraqi brigades to Baghdad over the next month and a half.

Nonetheless, even in outlining the plan, some American officials acknowledged deep skepticism about whether the new Iraq plan could succeed.

They said two-thirds of the promised Iraqi force would consist of Kurdish pesh merga units to be sent from northern Iraq, and they said some doubts remained about whether they would show up in Baghdad and were truly committed to quelling sectarian fighting.

The call for an increase in troops would also put Mr. Bush in direct confrontation with the leaders of the new Democratic Congress, who said in a letter to the president on Friday that the United States should move instead toward a phased withdrawal of American troops, to begin in the next four months.

Even the normally level-headed John Keegan appears to have joined the happy crowd shouting ‘More of that nice Kool-Aid if you please Reverend Jim!”

President George W. Bush is about to launch a final push in Iraq with a large reinforcement of American troops in the hope of crushing the insurgency before America embarks on a large-scale withdrawal of force from the country.

The size of the force is commonly set at about 40,000-50,000 troops. The aim of this surge will be to inflict severe damage and loss on the problem-making elements within Iraq, including both Shia and Sunni militias, and to increase training of the Iraqi security forces under American supervision.

The arguments against the surge are that it might exacerbate the violence without deterring the perpetrators from persisting in their attacks and that it might result in a sharp increase in American casualties with no observable gain. The arguments for trying a surge are that it is defeatist to concentrate on withdrawal from Iraq without attempting a final effort to make military force work.

This line in particular is a corker, what sort of really powerful mind-altering drugs is John Keegan taking these days? Or does Blair’s PR office have his kids held hostage someplace?

The cost of such tactics is likely to be high but not unbearable if enough armoured vehicles are used to protect the attacking troops.

‘Cost’ for who John?

Doing a Fallujah in say Sadr City isn’t just going to kill active participants. Fighting in a built-up area full of grannies and little kids, the troops will have absolutely no way to tell whether their heavy weapons are hitting fighters or civilians. Using armour and air power is just going to kill all of them indiscriminately.

The idea seems to be that they’re going to repeat the Grozny-like success of their operation in Fallujah against either some other Sunni cities or more likely Sadr City. It doesn’t sound like they’re really too sure what they intend to achieve actually, it sounds like they’re thrashing around helplessly without any coherent plan at all other than ‘kill some more Iraqis to prove we aren’t sissies’ but whatever it is it’ll probably kill a lot of people for no particular reason. A second US carrier battle-group arrives in the region this week, so we can be fairly sure the bombs are going to rain down on some poor buggers in the near future.

These idiots are in dreamland. They appear to have mistaken their domestic political propaganda for reality somewhere along the line. They’re living in a myth. So much more comfortable than reality, but a lot more dangerous to those around them. Top 10 Myths about Iraq.

Doubtless our lying shitweasel of a Prime Minister the Reverend Tony Blair will be just as keen to support this murderous stupidity as he was to prevent a ceasefire in the Lebanon in order that the IDF could carry on doing Gods Work (TM) against the unfortunate Lebanese civilian population and vital infrastructure. Maybe he’ll even volunteer some UK troops to join in the fun, just by way of showing the increasingly angry and cynical population of the UK once again just who it is that he really works for. It certainly isn’t the majority of ordinary working people of the UK, who now have the blood of thousands of innocent strangers in the Middle East on their hands whether they like it or not (and almost all of us do not) and have the exciting challenge of wondering about whether we’re going to get suicide bombed on the way to work, for no reasons that make any sense to any of us, thanks to Blair’s puppy-like eagerness to be of faithful service to his neo-conservative masters.

After invading and occupying Iraq on the basis of of a bunch of big fat stinking lies, turning it into a sort of live-action Disneyland for wanna-be jihadis and letting them practice on US troops until they get to be really competent and dangerous jihadis, increasing the threat of domestic terrorism, getting a whole lot of mostly working class lads who joined the US and UK military killed, along with a couple of hundred times their number of Iraqis and all of it for no readily obvious reason, you’d think there would be some way to do something about these lunatics, but no. They’re still in power and still making the world a shittier place to live in for almost all of us.

The thought that all it’s achieved is to put a bunch of chanting, noose-waving, hooded death squad guys in power and generate fat revenue streams for KBR, Blackwater and Halliburton isn’t particularly convincing me that any of this was a smart move.

If there was some point to it, that might be different, but it’s pretty clear that the Iraqis overwhelmingly (81%) want occupation troops gone sometime pretty soon and without waiting around for ‘security to improve’, that they think, almost certainly correctly that the occupying troops are causing more violence than they’re preventing (78%) but that they don’t believe that they’re going to go away willingly (78%), which is why so many Iraqis (61%) now actually support attacks on US troops.

If we’re supposed to be there for the Iraqis’ benefit, it’s pretty clear that hasn’t worked out, so it’s time to leave. If we’re actually there for some other reason that our government doesn’t want to admit to, let’s hear what it actually is and see whether we think it’s in our interests.

One thing you could say for Stern is that his target of 550ppm CO2 equivalent is better than nothing at all and his approach has more chance of working, because it doesn’t conflict with capitalism, than any approach that could stabilise at 450ppm, which is what the scientists mostly reckon we need to be aiming at, but which Stern effectively dismisses as unrealistic due to the economics. There might be some doubt in the models about what happens around 550ppm but there is very little doubt (outside of the Scientific Aliiance and other PR front groups) that things will get pretty bad with unconstrained emissions, taking us to 750ppm plus before the end of this century.

If mitigation is going to fail or fall seriously short, probably because the three major emitters of the next century won’t come on board even with capital-friendly proposals like Stern’s, that leaves us only with adaptation. Adaptation to climate change, unlike mitigation to prevent it, is largely a local matter and very frequently has local benefits, such as improved food and energy security (ie lower bills) and less local environmental damage. If we’re going to follow that chain of thought though, the first step is to figure out what we’re adapting to exactly. Here are the basic headlines.

We’re in a globalised world right now, significant amounts of our food and basic commodities come from areas that are already having severe problems due to climate change and are likely to get a lot worse. So one immediate question that arises is the impact on our own food security, especially if mitigation fails or falls short and we’re into the worse scenarios, both from ecosystem collapses elsewhere and from severe weather effects in the UK. In the North and West we can expect much heavier rains and weather damage to crops, in the South and East drought.

Another implication is a 1930’s style economic depression. So we’d be likely to experience a severe fall in our standard of living by say 2050. Many people here will certainly still be alive to experience long-term unemployment, unreasonable costs for basic necessities and probably some fairly repressive government action to protect ruling class interests from angry poor people. Of course a small ruling class will still be fat and happy, just as they were during the Great Depression, but most of us will be in deep shit.

We’re also talking about some hundreds of million people from closer to the equator becoming refugees, probably quite pissed off because they’ll understand why they’re refugees. They’ll be refugees because their crops have failed due to drought, pest invasions, severe weather damage or desertification, or because their lands are being flooded or because nutters with guns are fighting over the leftover crumbs.

I am personally quite concerned that the adaptations we’ll see will be highly repressive and reactionary and I think stealth taxes are far from the worst of what we might see as the situation worsens over the next few decades, as capitalism frantically tries to keep getting a good return on investments.

I would want to see adapatation that makes us less dependent on the global economy, in order to both minimise the impact on the UK and to reduce the pressure that the UK’s need for economic growth and a healthy return on investments, puts onto the developing countries.

In the meantime, I think the nuLabour spin machine intends to present us with “Green Gordon: Eco-Saviour” and exploit this issue in order to push through a bunch of regressive policies of benefit mainly to fat-cats rather than ordinary people either here or in the developing world. Paul Wolfowitz, neo-con president of the World Bank has already said that he and his pal Gordon will be getting together next year to decide on a sustainable development investment framework for the developing world. Which may mean the IMF selling poor countries “climate change insurance.”

The other side of the media debate that I think we’ll have framed for us is a lot of scare stories and moaning from the Daily Mail et al about ‘Green Taxes’. This will be all the more plausible because undoubtedly these issues will be used as a rationale to impose taxes on individuals (in preference to businesses)

I strongly suspect that the tax issue is being used a bit like the ‘business as usual OR going back to the stone age’ media frame we so often see.

It’s being used by those who want to avoid any progress whatsoever on this issue to frame our choices as being EITHER higher tax OR complete inaction.

What should we be trying to do? (Whether the Government and the City want us to or not)

I would suggest that a very good thing to do would be to invest substantially in improving the energy efficiency of our housing stock and food systems and in the provision of effective public transport to get people out of their cars.

We’d probably get a lot more real security out of that, per pound spent, than out of paying the yanks tens of billions for the Trident replacement for example.

There are also obvious intrinsic benefits to the average punter in improving energy efficiency in those three key areas, Food, Transport and Housing.

If those things are more energy efficient, all other things being equal (which I agree they are not due to the needs of investors to turn a profit) then the cost of heating, eating and travelling should be reduced.

The main problem that I can see is the potential for conflict between energy efficiency and the needs of investors. For example, power companies make less money that way. The nuclear industry is salivating at the prospect of being paid out of our taxes to build more reactors. Train companies are now privatised so any public investment made in them goes to pay for ever more spectacular Branson ballooning expeditions and so on. Large landowners are doing very nicely thank you out of being subsidised to do energy-inefficient farming methods. Property developers interests conflict strongly with most of the things you’d have to do to spread the population out to improve food system efficiency and with tighter regulations on energy efficiency for new builds.

The fundamental problem with nuLabour or any government that is likely to be electable is that they are there to put those interests ahead of ours.

Most of what I would like to see comes down to redirecting existing subsidies for undesirable outcomes towards desirable ones. That is against the religion (neo-liberal economics) of our current rulers however. Whether more taxes need to be raised is a moot point while we are subsidising and regulating in favour of more climate change. Maybe additional taxes are required, but while current policy provides perverse incentives, it would seem to be sensible to fix that as a matter of urgency.

Making the UK more sustainable has impacts beyond global mitigation. It also, particularly if it’s done with this in mind, tends to reduce our vulnerability to the likely global impact. So we get local adaptation benefits whether or not it has any effect on global mitigation.

Concrete example, if a serious effort were made, either with or without government sponsorship (it’d be a lot easier with) to improve the sustainability of our food systems, then when food prices go up as the result of climate change damage elsewhere, the impact on the less well off in the UK is reduced.

In addition although the focus above is on UK sustainability, by removing the perverse incentives which make it more profitable to fly lettuces in from Africa, we also reduce the pressure in Africa to grow food for export instead of for feeding the locals. Which acts to improve local food security there. It acts to remove perverse incentives for destroying woodland which provides a much needed carbon sink and helps to mitigate soil erosion, drought etc. We also reduce the amount of carbon emitted flying lettuces halfway around the world when we can perfectly well grow our own lettuces right here.